Gathered Leaves: Photographs by Alec Soth

Gathered Leaves closed on 26 June 2016. For details of our current exhibitions, take a look at our what’s on page.

Recently described by the Telegraph as the ‘greatest living photographer of America’s social and geographical landscape’, Alec Soth is widely considered to be one of the world’s foremost documentary photographers.

Like many great photographers and writers from the American canon—such as Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld—Soth takes the open road as his subject, but brings to it his own unique, modern twist. He is admired for his experimentation across exhibition, book, magazine and digital forms.

Through haunting, intimate portraits, desolate landscapes and wide open wildernesses, his work captures a profound sense of what it is to be human. Tenderness, joy, disappointment, fear or pride: his striking portraits capture the rawness of human emotion and the tension between our conflicting desires for individualism and community.

This exhibition presented selections from his four signature series—Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010) and the most recent, Songbook (2014)—and highlighted his remarkable career and distinctive vision.

As Soth’s first major UK show, Gathered Leaves offered a unique opportunity to see the journey his photographs have made from the printed page to the exhibition wall.